They talked, and they couldn’t be certain, because measuring feelings of growing dread wasn’t exactly as simple as sliding beads, but they thought that whatever was causing the madness had to be coming from the Color Prince’s camp itself. Or from one of his ships nearby. No one seemed to want to talk about the prospect of fighting a battle when men were as likely to jump off their ships as they were to obey an order. It seemed an invitation to chaos and slaughter.

Gavin didn’t come back that night. Kip wondered if he’d died somewhere, far away and alone.

The next morning, Commander Ironfist headed out again, but this time he wouldn’t let anyone who could draft green come with him. Kip was left alone. He waved to Cruxer and grimaced at his own ill fortune. When he turned to go inside, he found himself staring at Grinwoody.

“Young master,” the slave said. “Luxlord Guile finds himself with a spare hour. He wishes to play Nine Kings with you. Attend me, please.”

It wasn’t, of course, a request.

“And if I won’t come?” Kip asked.

Grinwoody smiled his unpleasant smile. “Long swim home.”

Chapter 104

Gavin barely made it to the Chromeria before nightfall, the skimmer going slower and slower as his eyes strained for light. At least the waters were still enough that he was able to land directly on the back side of Little Jasper, where there was a tiny dock, rather than having to draft an entire dory by starlight and row in to Big Jasper and walk.

Stepping onto the creaking wood, he disintegrated the yellow skimmer. He rubbed his arms and shoulders, hoping they didn’t cramp. The muscles were trembling and weak from his journey even though the last two hours had been slow going. He was starting to feel a sick foreboding that yellow was getting harder to draft. He hoped it was simply the gathering night, and not that he would wake tomorrow unable to draft yellow at all. If so, he was going to have a hard time getting back to the fleet before the battle was over.

He tried to smile over the rising terror. At least he was going to spend tonight in Karris’s arms. To the evernight with everything else. What had the Third Eye said? “Bruised and broken as you are, it might be your only chance”? Gavin was sore and fatigued, but he was neither bruised nor broken, so either she had meant the “you” to mean Karris or she was simply wrong. Regardless, he wasn’t going to solve the mysteries of prophecy and he didn’t care to. He just wanted to see his wife. His wife. How odd that phrase seemed. And yet how he’d missed her. He felt it keenly now, now that she was so close and his mind wasn’t crowded with fighting, plotting, doing, doing, doing. Some part of him thought that she was going to be snatched away if he didn’t hurry. He opened the lock on the stout oak door. The hinges were rusty. Pulling the door open made him aware again of how tired his arms were. He tried to lift a hand over his head and couldn’t.

The door opened to a long, claustrophobia-inducing tunnel, barely wide enough for one man to pass with his shoulders turned. Gavin touched his hand to one of the ingenious sub-red switches, and from the heat of his hand, it triggered a reaction that opened panels of yellow down the length of the tunnel. Sometimes it was the simple, elegant things that could be done with magic that impressed him far more than his own brute-force behemoths.

Five minutes down the tunnel deposited him at an iron gate with a different lock. He opened that and took a narrow staircase up into the front yard of the Chromeria. By the time he reached the lifts, two Blackguards had fallen in step beside him. He grinned at them. “Gentlemen.”

“Lord Prism,” they said.

He took the lift up, and then the second lift to his own floor, walked past the Blackguards, who didn’t look surprised in the least to see him—how did they do that, anyway? He walked to his own door, then, thinking he heard something, he looked down the hall. The White’s door was closing, very slowly.

She must be asleep. Her guards are being careful not to wake her.

But still Gavin hesitated. You should go check that out. For a second he was aware of himself, poised between going in to a beautiful woman and going to an old crone. What kind of an idiot even thinks that’s a choice?

Cursing himself for a fool, he left his door and strode quickly down the hall. It was rude to enter anyone’s room filled with luxin; it was treated like coming in with a pistol leveled at your host’s head, and if Gavin could get away with many things, that wasn’t one of them. Not with the White. So he drew in superviolet. What they couldn’t see couldn’t be rude, could it?

He opened her door as stealthily as it had just been shut. A crack, and then more. Bodies wearing Blackguard garb lay on the floor and a figure was treading slowly toward the White’s bed, clad all in black.

The light streaming in from the well-lit hallway betrayed Gavin. The figure spun, drawing a pistol from his belt in a smooth, fast motion.

Gavin blasted the door open with his shoulder and dove into the White’s room, shouting, “Assassin!”

The pistol roared. Its ball shattered wood and whined, ricocheting off the stone behind it.

A gray ball nearly two feet across shot out of the man’s hands, catching Gavin’s first Blackguard as he was jumping into the room and drawing his pistol. It knocked him horizontal and back into the other Blackguard.

The assassin had dropped his first pistol and drew another, turning to kill the White, who was awake and scrambling to get off her bed.

From the floor, Gavin shot the tiniest spotlight beam of superviolet out, and as the assassin turned, Gavin’s superviolet played over the man’s hand. Then Gavin shot the rest of his superviolet.

Superviolet is delicate. All the superviolet Gavin held probably weighed only as much as a hairpin, and it wasn’t strong, but even a hairpin flung at great speed can have some effect. The superviolet burned the air and slammed into the back of the assassin’s hand, cracking bones and flinging the pistol out of the man’s grip.

Gray-white light flooded the chamber from a dozen sources. Gavin popped up off the floor, instinctively drawing in light to hurl blue spears at the assassin.

He was all the way up and throwing his body forward to ready itself for the massive recoil of the magic he was about to throw when he realized he hadn’t drafted anything.

The assassin’s counter of another ball of gray light caught Gavin full in the chest. It launched him backward and he slammed into a wall, the impact driving his breath from him.

Green, his brain told him helpfully. He’s not drafting gray, that’s green. I just can’t see it anymore.

The assassin pulled out another pistol and leveled it at Gavin. From this range, with Gavin still trying to suck in his first breath, the man couldn’t miss.

A sunburst of white-gray light lit the man, and Gavin saw the White standing in her bedrobe, a cloud of tiny glowing particles floating in front of her, like motes of dust. Her hands snapped forward, and so did the entire cloud. The sound of the tiny flechettes hitting the assassin was like the sound of Blackguards at archery practice, when an entire volley studded the targets.

The assassin froze, and a moment later, tiny droplets of blood formed on his skin, everywhere. His back had been turned to the White, and the tiny glassine flechettes had gone all the way through him. The assassin blinked bloody eyes, confused, knowing only that something was terribly wrong, and then he collapsed on the floor and began convulsing.